I just upgraded to WordPress 2.0 and I’m not all that impressed with the results. The WYSIWYG editor (that I was so excited to see included) does not work well. In fact, I couldn’t even get it to apply formatting at all in Firefox 1.5. I would highlight the text, click the bold button, and it would flash bold for a brief period before reverting back to non-bold. No idea why. Also, no way to format pictures (float right, for example) or browse images on the server before inserting them. I switched back to ChenPress, which is much more functional.
Also, the file-uploader is not very useful for uploading pictures. I received safe-mode errors and it would not upload. IImageBrowser worked much better, but I had to disable WYSIWYG editing to access the text area toolbar from which IImageBrowser is launched.
On the positive side, the new admin interface looks great and the usability there has been improved quite a bit. It’s possible to edit plugins, easier to figure out the .htaccess file, has the comment spam plug-in by default, etc.
Eventually, I think the WYSIWYG editor will catch-up with what people need. But at this point, it is an unremarkable first attempt.
For similar opinions, see Tikun Olam’s review.
I couldn’t agree more regarding 2.0. It’s a good start but needs a lot more work. I’m a bit surprised they didn’t catch some of these issues before releasing it.
I’ll also check out ChenPress.
However, I didn’t have yr problems w. FF/Wysiwyg conflicts. THough I did once have the same problem w. earlier FF versions & Typepad’s wysiwyg editor. What version of FF are you using? If you meet this problem in future & want to try a fix you might try creating a new FF profile for yourself. W. some FF versions it’s very easy to corrupt the user profile. Creating a new one might do the trick. I’m using FF 1.5.
I’m not sure why the default WYSIWYG editor was not working. But because it was lacking features such as “float picture right”, I didn’t try to figure it out. Thanks for the troubeshooting tip. I’ll probably eventually look into it.
By the way, instead of ChenPress 3.x, I still use ChenPress 2, which has a button above the text_area input field in WordPress. I launch IImageBrowser, upload, thumbnail, genetate the code, and paste the code into the text_area input. I then close the IImageBrowser window and click the “FCKeditor” button to launch ChenPress 2, which imports the HTML code that was in the text_area and displays the IImageBrowser picture properly.
The ideal method would be to either:
1. Have IImageBrowser work as a plug-in for ChenPress (launches and imports correct code after ChenPress is launched)
2. Have a button above the text_area in “WordPress edit post” window to toggle ChenPress 3 on and off, so that IImageBrowser could be used to upload and paste code prior to launching ChenPress and hiding the text button bar above the text_area.
I’ve since upgraded to WordPress 2.02 and switched my WYSIWYG editor over to EditorMonkey. I’m much more impressed with this combination.
First of all, the WordPress upgrade took me about 15 minutes for the first site I upgraded (mine) and about 5 minutes for the second site (my wifes).
EditorMonkey is a huge and complex plug-in, but it was very well written and continually developed, unlike ChenPress, which seems to have been abandoned. EditorMonkey allows full configuration of the editor through the WordPress interface and allows for the use of either FCKeditor or TinyMCE. This is really a great plug-in, highly recommended.
http://www.rajprasad.net/plugins/editormonkey